Despite the fact that I’ve been home from Southeast Asia for over a year, I’ve still got stories to share! Here’s one that I’ve had time to reflect on.
At first nothing seemed any different. I woke up at our hotel in Koh Samui and went through the usual routine of having breakfast and going to the beach. But when I checked my email, I saw one from my grandmother telling me about a “situation” going on in Thailand and was I okay? It was news to me. I used the opportunity to check my phone and on the CNN front page were the words “military coup in Thailand.”
Nothing on the island seemed to have changed. There wasn’t a military presence there and there wasn’t any sort of curfew. The bars and restaurants continued to operate like it was business as usual. I responded to my family and said everything was fine and not to worry.
Days went on and we continued onto Koh Tao before another overnight train back to Bangkok, still thinking little of the developing situation. All that was on our minds was the one month we had left in the trip and getting our visas for Vietnam.
We spent little time in Bangkok during the entire trip, mostly using it as a hub, and this time around was no different. We checked into a basic hotel in the Chit Lom BTS station and also within walking distance of the Vietnamese embassy. We had our money, forms and photos ready to go and dropped them off without a problem.
In the meantime, all we did was wait. We could have taken this as an opportunity to go on tours and see the sights, but instead we spent days wandering the malls, going to see a movie and eating at cafes. It was then that we started to understand the gravity of the situation.
On our way to lunch one day, we saw an entire park full of tents, where protesters had been camping. Another protest happened in front of a mall as we walked past. And one night, we had to eat dinner quickly before all the restaurants were forced to close down for mandatory curfew.
As the days went on the situation started to change. The curfew affected the day’s plans. The televisions only played government programming, a constant stream of Thai words we didn’t understand. The curfew ran from 9 pm to 5 am, which would usually be fine, but once we got our visas and booked our flights to Vietnam, we had to figure out how we would get out of Thailand.
I knew that during a similar situation a few years prior, the airport had been shut down. I started to worry that we’d be left stranded without a way to get home and would waste the money on missed flights. So before things got worse, we needed to get to the airport.
We consulted the employees at the hotel about how to get to the airport for our early morning flight without having problems with the curfew. They said that it should be fine since we were tourists, not locals, but the major issue was getting a taxi. What if the driver got stopped on his way to pick us up? To remedy the situation, we took a taxi at 8 pm to Don Mueang Airport, Bangkok’s budget carrier hub, to stay the night and be up early to catch our AirAsia flight.
Groggy from tossing and turning on hard metal seats and frustrated from the chaos that is checking in for AirAsia flights, we boarded our flight to Hanoi. I almost held my breath, waiting for another mishap, but once the wheels were up, I could relax.
This must have been kind of stressful! But all part of the adventure!
Wow, it sounds as though you did a great job keeping your cool during a potentially dangerous situation! Good thing you didn’t know quite the whole story when you responded to your grandmother’s concerns. That’s not something you’d want her to see in a blog post before you’ve arrived safely at home.
The curfew stuff always sounded so impractical for reasons just like this. I’m glad you guys made it out ok even if you did have to sleep at the airport!
It’s very usefuul to us to have learned your article, my husband and i plan to visite Thailand for scuba diving, we heard about phuket that is a wanderfull place for diving hollidays
We hope that everything will be okay :-)